Political Party or Startup?

There’s a lot of similarities in founding startup companies and political parties in Indonesia.

Both require committed founders, lots of money, solid product, and aggressive member or user acquisition. Their eventual options are either to be one of the larger parties or they sell to one of the larger parties.

In political parties, the products are the legislative candidates carrying the belief and the idea that the party will make a difference and bring positive change to the people they meant to represent. Parties send candidates or evangelists who promise to bring about such change to gain voters and get these candidates to the parliaments to supposedly do what they say.

If user or voter acquisition efforts fail to deliver on time, the co-founders along with the board may decide to sell the entity and bring its users/voters to the acquiring entity in the hope that they don’t get too pissed off. The top executives may also decide to join the flock to ease concerns that the idealism would go away once the old entity disappears. Of course, having been built with various levels of differences in ideologies, implementations, and executions, there will always be friction and the post merger/acquisition results depend on how these are handled by the new team.

Regardless of the outcome, I’ve found the entire end to end process in both cases extremely similar in its core. Similar principles apply to both situations and similar theories also work in practice to solve the issues that they face. – Read on Path.